Kaplan-contexts = Lewis-contexts?

According to Lewis (1980), a context is a concrete situation where a sentence could be said, to be identified with a spatio-temporally centered possible world. Lewis seems to interpret Kaplan-context as being things such as his, as opposed to tuples of features of locations (see p. 42 of the reprint).

And indeed Kaplan says the following in ‘Afterthoughts:’

“... we should say that context provides whatever parameters are needed. [Footnote: This, rather than saying that context is the needed parameter, which seems more natural for the pretheoretical notion of a context of use, in which each parameter has an interpretation as a natural feature of a certain region of the world.]” (p. 591, emphases in the original).

In so far as I remember, this interpretation seems to be, in any case, at least consistent with the formal system in “Demonstratives” (p. 543). Or am I wrong here?

Relativizing Utterance-Truth?

Some time ago, Manolo García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel organized a very fine workshop, which was the origin of Relative Truth, forthcoming in OUP.

For some time I’ve been thinking about the title of the workshop, Relativizing Utterance Truth: some people seem to think that one could characterize a radical relativist position such as MacFarlane’s or Lasersohn’s via the rejection of the absoluteness of utterance-truth. But it seems to me this would fail as a characterization: there are versions of moderate views which reject it as well. I elaborate on this in this note, forthcoming in Synthese.

St Andrews

Wow, that was a long long blog-break! Hope this changes a little.

I am still recovering from the Arché tempo for ten days: the Assertion Workshop, the First Contextualism & Relativism Workshop, plus giving one paper to the C&R Seminar and another for the Nostalgia Seminar. The discussions were very very useful for me, I hope I’ll post on them soon.

It was just great seeing again friends and meeting the new crowd there!!